Syntactic Structures and Recursive Devices: A Legacy of Imprecision

Taking Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures as a starting point, this paper explores the use of recursive techniques in contemporary linguistic theory. Specifically, it is shown that there were profound ambiguities surrounding the notion of recursion in the 1950s, and that this was partly due to the fact that influential texts such as Syntactic Structures neglected to define what exactly constituted a recursive device. As a result, uncertainties concerning the role of recursion in linguistic theory have prevailed until the present day, and some of the most common misunderstandings that have appeared in recent discussions are examined at some length. This article shows that debates about such topics are frequently undermined by fundamental misunderstandings concerning core terminology, and the full extent of the prevailing haziness is revealed. An attempt is made, for instance, to distinguish between such things as iterative constructional devices and self-similar syntactic embedding, despite the fact that these are usually both unhelpfully classified as examples of recursion. Consequently, this article effectively constitutes a plea for much greater accuracy and clarity when such important issues are addressed from a linguistic perspective.